The Sick are Healed

Don’t trip over all the casts, crutches, slings and splints scattered along the streets of North America tonight. They were discarded this morning by Met after Met who was magically healed by the news that Ray Ramirez will no longer be training them.

The sick, the lame and the day-to-day are all up on their feet, their hamstrings pleasingly loose, their limbs fully flexed, their ulnas utterly undisturbed. Michael Conforto’s posterior capsule is as smooth and supple as a baby’s bottom. Wilmer Flores’s nose breathes free and easy; just try fouling a ball of that schnozz now. Tommy Milone’s left elbow, which was described as sore in late September, can be referred to as totally mellow in early October.

Once an organization has its Ramirez removed, the rehabilitation program occurs organically. Consider that since the Mets announced their head trainer of thirteen seasons will not return for a fourteenth, they haven’t placed a single player on the disabled list. Nor have they lost a single game. During the final year Ray was spotted continually emerging from the dugout to have a little look-see, what did the Mets do? They lost games and they went on the disabled list.

The losses are clearly not all his fault, that would be the lack of depth. However, the need for an extraordinary amount of depth, was due to an extraordinary volume of injuries, which has not been a one-year fluke. I’m not a doctor or trainer, but clearly something was not quite right with their training program.

Baseball is a game/occupation with lots of repetitive stress. Also, it’s played by young men who tend not to worry about crashing on a friend’s couch after a night out. I suppose we could place each player in a suspended animation deep freeze between games and ship them carefully when they travel for 81 games. One of the probs with all sports these days is that we have the athletes honed for max performance and it isn’t sustainable. Besides reducing the schedule to 154 (142 would be better) games, I would have coaches focused much more on the proper fundamentals and think smart while out there. Any other thoughts that wouldn’t mess with the tradition of the beautiful game?

This would be nice if all of the mets’ injury/diagnostic/rehabilitative woes belonged to ramirez alone. I’m guessing he takes his directions from the wilpons – through whatever appropriate conduit.
If we could only vote out the ownership group…

On the other hand if many of the mets’ injured stars don’t actually recover (or stay on ths field for too long) in ’18, ray will be glad he’s spending more time with the family or whatever….

As for barwis, flexibility and agility are way overrated in today’s game…rampant freak injuries give our humble and cerebral sport much needed (and mr bill-inspired) physicality!

You know what? It’s the trainer’s job to keep the team healthy. By that metric, Ramirez has been doing an awful job for years and years and years. Is it fair to him? Not entirely. But it’s not entirely unfair either. Managers have been fired for less (see: Collins, Terry). At the end of the day, it’s about results, and Ramirez hadn’t produced. All of which said, I think Barwis is at least as culpable, if not more so. Bulking up baseball players has been discredited at least since the end of the Steroid Era. He should be home as well.

In today’s Bill Barnwell article at ESPN, he said the NY (football) Giants have been the most injured team in the NFL for several years. Like the Mets, the Giants team doctors are from the Hospital for Special Surgery.

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